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Friday, June 02, 2006

The Times They Are A'Puzzling

Sometimes life just feels too confusing.

There they were tonight, to all the world the perfect married couple, longingly looking into each other’s eyes and professing their undying love to each other - Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau.

While you can’t help but wonder what strange impulse leads a 34-year-old woman to want to have sex with a 13-year-old boy way back when, they came off today largely as any other newly wed couple.

I don’t know what to make of it all, and while I’m not trying to justify anything that Letourneau did in her position of power as a teacher, the legal irony crosses my mind that at that young age, Fualaau is seen by the law as not having the judgment to make a reasoned decision about his sexual relations. However, if he’d murdered someone, he’d be tried as an adult.

For some reason, that reminds me of the polygamist who’s on the lam and who the FBI has put him on its Top 10 Wanted List, the one with Osama bin Laden on it. (That should give the guy some cold comfort that he’ll stay free for some time.) He’s wanted for pedophilia for his serial marriages to young teenaged girls, which makes me wonder why no one in this jurisdiction has ever prosecuted the so-called Irish Travelers who come to Memphis every few years and get marriage licenses for a batch of older men to marry girls in their mid-teens. There was even a newspaper article about it the last time it happened, but no one in the prosecutor’s office seemed to take notice.

I’m not really drawing any conclusions about any of this. To me, it is all just a puzzlement, which is the overriding description of our times.